Introduction and Microsoft Delve Analytics
Business intelligence apps are incredibly smart – unless you want to learn about productivity. Many apps show you how many people clicked on a link at a website or purchased a product, and some provide lush graphics related to revenue and sales progress.
Others are designed primarily to show you the uptime for a server and whether a network is humming along. In some cases, you can find a wealth of information about employee tasks and project completion.
However, there hasn't been as much effort in the business intelligence (BI) market to show you whether people in a large company are answering their emails, responding quickly enough, how much time they spend in meetings (or if they are even worth the time), and how productive they are creating and editing documents.
In others words, the part of an employee's effort related to actually doing real work during the day, which often accounts for the majority of their time. In fact, one study from last year conducted by Adobe suggested that employees spend as many as 6.3 hours per day checking email. So much for worrying about network uptime.
Fortunately, that's starting to change with several dashboards that show data related to personal productivity, both for the individual user and for teams. These dashboards show how long it takes to respond to emails, how much time a team spends in meetings, and who is replying most frequently to messages from customers.
They can have a dramatic impact not just on productivity across a company but on the bottom line. These apps reveal not just whether people are completing tasks but how they spend their time and their effectiveness at common activities.
1. Microsoft Delve Analytics
The new kid on the block, Microsoft Delve Analytics, is a powerful productivity dashboard. Employees can find out, at a glance, how much time they've spent processing email, attending meetings, their "focus time" working on documents, and even how much time they've spent working after hours.
Although it's not built-in to the product today, there are some implications about tying the analytics for productivity into the costs involved. For example one scenario might be in determining which meetings are wasting dollars because they involve too many attendees who do not even need to be involved.
Delve also shows which employees have collaborated on projects. You can drill down to see which collaborations involve fast email response times or which contacts an employee has not communicated with enough.
"What makes Delve Analytics particularly interesting is the trove of data Microsoft collects from Office 365 users that Delve turns into analysis," says Charles King, an IT analyst with PUND-IT. "Most of the other productivity apps I've seen focus on helping individuals identify and correct poor work habits. The ability of Delve to mine and analyse Office 365 user behaviour can provide valuable insights for individual workers but their employers can also use the tool to see how various employees and work groups are performing.
"I doubt that workers will be happy to have what amounts to a virtual efficiency assistant peering over their shoulders but it's likely that many companies using Office 365 will find Delve valuable."
Huddle and Front
2. Huddle
Huddle is a powerful content management app, but the behind-the-scenes analytics make it unique. You can find out a treasure trove of information about who has seen, edited, reviewed, and saved documents on a team. Filters also allow you to see who has made comments, assigned, deleted, approved, or downloaded a document, which gives insight into what people are doing during the day.
A people-centric view shows you a list of the recent activity by any person related to documents stored in the system. It's invaluable because document management is often an activity that is only related to the number of files you've created, and not how people are actually working on them and what they are doing.
Nikos Drakos, a Research Director at Gartner, says it is important to find out how many sources a tool uses to show you people productivity data. For example, Delve is tied in closely with the Office suite and looks at email, meetings scheduled through Outlook, and documents created with the Office suite
Huddle does not include as many sources because the app itself is mostly designed for document management, although that could change as Huddle expands beyond its basic business model. Also, it might be exactly what companies need to get a handle on documents as opposed to other areas of productivity.
3. Front
Front is like a mash-up of Slack, Gmail, WhatsApp, and about five other tools. It's meant for team collaboration so you are doing more than just answering emails – you are working together on a document or a project and can chat and discuss work together. While Gmail is more for one person answering messages and keeping an email thread, it is not as good at showing who has chatted about a topic, which changes have been made to a document, or the status of tasks related to the project.
Within the app, the analytics tools are amazingly rich. You can quickly view the total number of conversations on a project, the busiest day of the week for that project, the response time to conversations, the total time spent in discussions, and even a percentage 'rating' of how often someone on a team responds quickly.
Most of these settings are available only to the employee although a company could configure it so an admin has full exposure to all of the productivity-related data.
Because Front is so new (the company is only two-years-old), analysts were not aware that it even existed, but said an important point to consider is that any dashboard worth your time should use machine learning to give you a snapshot of productivity, which is exactly what Front does. With a glance, you can see who has the best email response time or who has contacted the most customers over the course of a week to start a new customer relationship.
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